This post is the first of a brief series of posts I plan to write about the integration of “people search” (employee directory) with your enterprise search solution. In a sense, this treats “people” as just another piece of content within your search, though they represent a very valuable type of content.

This post will be an introduction and describe both a first and second generation solution to this problem. In subsequent posts, I plan to describe a solution that takes this solution forward one step (simplifying things for your users among other things) and then into some research that I believe shows a lot of promise and which you might be able to take advantage of within your own enterprise search solution.

Why People Search?

Finding contact information for your co-workers is such a common need that people have, forever, maintained phone lists – commonly just as word processing documents or spreadsheets – and also org charts, probably in a presentation file format of some type. I think of this approach as a first generation solution to the people search problem.

Its challenges are numerous, including:

The maintenance of the document is fraught with the typical issues of maintaining any document (versioning, availability, etc.)

In even a moderately large organization, the phone list may need to be updated by several people throughout the organization to keep it current.

Search within this kind of phone list is limited – you can ensure you always have the latest version and then open it up and use your word processor’s search function or (I remember this well, myself) always keep a printout of the latest version of the phone list next to your workspace so you can look through it when you need to contact someone.

As computer technology has evolved and companies implemented corporate directories for authentication purposes (Active Directory, LDAP, eDirectory, etc.), it has become common to maintain your phone book as a purely online system based on your corporate directory. What does such a solution look like and what are its challenges?

A “Second Generation” Solution

I think it’s quite common now that companies will have an online (available via their intranet) employee directory that you can search using some (local, specific to the directory) search tools. Obvious things like doing fielded searches on name, title, phone number, etc. My current employer has sold a product named eGuide for quite some time that provides exactly this type of capability.

eGuide is basically a web interface for exposing parts of your corporate Directory for search and also for viewing the org chart of a company (as reflected in the Directory).

We have had this implemented on our intranet for many years now. It has been (and continues to be) one of the more commonly used applications on our intranet.

The problems with this second generation solution, though, triggered me to try to provide a better solution a few years ago using our enterprise search. What are the problems with this approach? Here are the issues that triggered a different (better?) solution:

First and foremost, with nothing more than the employee finder as a separate place to search, you immediately force a searcher to have to make a decision before they do their search as to where they want to search. Many users might expect that the “enterprise” search actually does include anything that they can navigate to as potential targets so when they search on a person’s name and don’t see it in the result set they immediately think either A) why does the search not include individual people’s information, or B) this search engine is so bad that, even though it must include people information, it can’t even show the result at a high enough relevance to get it on the first page!

Despite my statement to the contrary above, I am aware that Jakob Nielsen does actually advocate the presence of both a “people search” box and a more general search box because people are aware of the distinction between searching for content and search for people. We do still have both search boxes on our intranet, though, in a sense, the people search box is redundant.

Secondly, the corporate directory commonly is a purely fielded search – you have to select which field(s) you want to search in and then you are restricted to searching just those fields.

In other words, you as a searcher, need to know in which field a particular string (or partial string) might appear. For many fields, this might not be an issue – generally, first and last name are clear (though not always), email, phone number, etc., but the challenge is that a user has to decide in which field they want to look.

Third, related to the previous point, directory searches are generally simplistic searches based on string matching or partial string matching. With a full search engine, you introduce the possibility of taking advantage of synonyms (especially useful on first names), doing spelling corrections, etc.

So there’s a brief description of what I would characterize as a first generation solution and a second generation solution along with highlights of some issues with each.

Up next, I’ll describe the next step forward in the solution to this issue – integrating people into your enterprise search solution.